Caring Is Creepy

The backlash against a culture that requires women to be perfect.

November 11, 2016

To be a woman in our society is to be a permanent
work-in-progress. This plays out through two different sets of pressures:
First, there are the obvious ones—on fat women to be thin, say, or on single
women to wed—where (often unsolicited) advice is aimed at women with traits that
are unfairly stigmatized. Waiting surreptitiously behind those pressures,
however, one finds a host of additional suggestions
aimed at the very women who could, one might imagine, revel in smug
self-satisfaction. Sometimes this second sort of advice will manifest itself as
a specific instruction (for example, that a thin woman could always be a bit more
toned). Other times, it’s more of an amorphous push towards self-improvement,
physical but phrased
in emotional terms.

AMERICA THE ANXIOUS: HOW OUR PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IS CREATING A NATION OF NERVOUS WRECKS by Ruth WhippmanSt. Martin’s Press, 256 pp., $25.99

One might suggest that women should just stop caring so much,
except that not-caring is the ultimate perfectibility
requirement. Which has made the cult of perfection a target in a new strain of female-authored, largely female-oriented
and often light-hearted writing. I’m thinking of Marisa Meltzer’s 2013 Elle story about
the hidden nature of contemporary dieting (hidden, that is, behind a cover of “juice
fasts and Goop cleanses and barre classes”), and Ruby Tandoh’s more recent Vice piece on
wellness and orthorexia. Also of Rachel Hills’s 2015 book, The Sex Myth, which pushes against the notion that there’s
a correct amount of sex everyone should be having. Comedy writer Jessi Klein
has a pro-epidural screed in her new book of essays, You’ll
Grow Out Of It. Of natural childbirth, she remarks: “No one ever
asks a man if he’s having a ‘natural root canal.’ No one ever asks if a man is
having a ‘natural vasectomy.’”

Perfection
quests are defined by their inherent unattainability. The new wellness advice
isn’t (just) about thinness; it urges a constant attentiveness to the provenance and nutritional attributes of every
ingredient. As a project, though, happiness is that much more amorphous than
“wellness,” demanding one’s full attention not just at mealtimes and during
workouts, but all the time. And it’s
that incessant quality that makes America
the Anxious, Ruth Whippman’s new book about America’s obsession with
happiness,so necessary.

As with
other installments in the perfection-rejection subgenre, Whippman’s book
addresses the pressures on those who are doing all right to do even better. The
“happiness” she writes about at the start of the book isn’t the absence of
sadness, but a quasi-spiritual level of delight. Indeed, unless one sticks with
a limited definition of happiness—that is, as the absence of clinical depression—the
category is about creating a problem where none existed. If you’re in a good
enough mood most of the time, do you need to strive to make yourself even
happier? Writes Whippman: “Workaday contentment starts to give way to a
low-grade sense of inadequacy when pitched against capital “H”Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s
impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been reached, a recipe for anxiety.” Like
skincare products that aim not to address specific dermatological needs but
rather to achieve better skin, the
happiness industry encourages us to chase an ideal of self-improvement.”

Perfection
quests don’t just leave those on them feeling inadequate and involve writing
for-profit entities big checks. In a chapter with the wonderful title,
“Personal Journey? It’s Not All About You,” Whippman interviews psychologist
and researcher Dr. Iris Mauss, who criticizes many happiness quests for
“‘self-focus.’” Mauss elaborates: “‘You can spend so much time focusing on what
you are feeling that you just don’t have time to focus on others.’” Whichever
perfection-seeking sinkhole a person—generally a woman—finds herself in, the
hours she devotes to pondering her own flaws is time she’s not spending out in the world, accomplishing things or simply
enjoying herself.

The book’s starting point is Whippman’s own experiences as a
trailing spouse. About five years ago, she gave up her job making documentaries
for television in London so that her husband could pursue a tech career in Silicon
Valley. She writes about lonely days at home with their baby, and the
(Facebook-fueled) angst of new motherhood. Anecdotal observations of her new
neighbors’ happiness pursuits lead her to read up a bit on American “happiness-seeking
culture,” at which point her “journalistic curiosity kicks in,” and she decides
to apply her background as an investigative reporter to get a deeper picture of
American happiness-chasing. (And also—although this goes unstated—to re-launch
her own career, a move that has, anecdotally, been known to increase a woman’s
happiness.)

She visits self-help workshops, but some sources are more
serendipitous—her husband befriends a “devout Mormon” at work, thus offering
Whippman, “half-Jewish” and agnostic, a glimpse of family life in a culture
very unlike her own. Research she cites supports what her reporting and
personal anecdotes suggest, namely that “men are significantly happier than
women, and the women who do the most ‘women-y’ type things, stay-at-home
mothers, are the least happy of all.”

One might suggest that women should just stop caring so much,
except that not-caring is the ultimate perfectibility
requirement.

That’s not to say Whippman’s point is that the obligation to
find happiness doesn’t impact men as well. Throughout the book, we meet plenty
of male happiness seekers, including a Zappos executive so committed to
positivity that he decides to “ban the word ‘don’t,’”
and so enthusiastic about his employer that, prior to coming on board, he worked
for the company unpaid for nine months despite his high rank. Whippman takes
us on a tour of bosses who offer a (supposedly) fun environment in exchange for
long hours and low pay. She also meets underprivileged middle school students
forced to reveal private struggles to their classmates as part of a
happiness-promoting program, reminiscent of the “privilege” walk exercises
aimed at their older and less needy counterparts. And the bleakest moment in
the narrative, a tour of suicides associated with Las Vegas’s start-up country,
is about a handful of deeply unhappy men.

Still, the demand to appear happy falls disproportionately
on women, from service-sector positions where a smile is part of the job (as Arlie
Russell Hochschild details in her seminal work The Managed Heart) to those upscale enclaves where women have
plenty of spare time to dwell on emotional matters. Whippman writes about both
situations, interviewing Hand to Mouth author
Linda Tirado to learn about expectations placed on fast-food workers, but also
describing a new friend she’d made in bourgeois California who prioritized yoga
and self-improvement workshops over hanging out.

There’s no one type of woman—no demographic category—that is
somehow immune to the pressure to be chipper. It impacts the sort of young white
women who seem to have it all (Whippman discusses the Penn student with the
upbeat Instagram feed who nonetheless committed suicide), as well as black
women, who—as Zerlina Maxwell noted
in an article about Sandra Bland’s death—“are stereotyped as aggressive or
angry, and this poisons every single interaction they have.” “Joy hunting,”
Whippman tells us, is not “just the ultimate luxury for a privileged bunch of
high-income Californians.” If anything, the happiness demand impacts
otherwise-marginalized women the most.

I especially appreciated Whippman’s takedown of
“empowerment,” which she calls “the consolation prize for those of us who will
never have any actual power.” She doesn’t spell out the gender implications,
but they’re hard to miss: “Creating a Tumblr of photos of your post-C-section
wobbling and scarred naked stomach? Empowering! Creating a Tumblr of photos of
your post-prostate-surgery rectum? Not so much.”

Why an anti-perfection-quest trend in women’s writing, why
now? Demands that women be perfect aren’t new. What’s new—and what, I suspect,
has inspired this backlash—is the emphasis these days on effortlessness, in beauty and in other arenas. (The latest hot new parenting book asks
parents to reject “parenting,” the verb, altogether, and to try by not trying.)
The “effortlessness” turn has had its plusses: We are fortunate enough to live
in the age of stretch waistbands, when sneakers have replaced stilettos as the
moment’s coveted accessories. Effortless-chic is sometimes genuine pushback
against perfectionism, but on the occasions it’s not, it’s perfectionism in its
most nefarious form. Not-caring has become its own meta-demand.

Another
reason for the trend is—and this one’s unavoidable—the fact that women’s
first-person writing sells. The confessional turn in women-oriented writing,
for all its sisterhood-solidarity comforts, can be exploitative. Meanwhile, anti-perfection lit may be the least fraught
sort of personal writing. All that’s being “confessed” is that one is a regular
human being—not a trait that will count as a liability for future employers and
so forth. This is a realm of self-deprecating humor, not self-sabotage.

It’s certainly possible to condemn the perfection
requirement without invoking or focusing on one’s own struggles (as in Madeleine Schwartz’s spot-on parody of the shares-her-routine beauty-writing genre), but the topic lends itself to a
personal telling. It helps to believe we’re hearing from a woman who was
on, or at least felt as if she ought to be on, one of these perfection quests,
to offset the gentle (or less-than-gentle)
mockery of those other women, their
earnest perfection-seeking counterparts. Thus why it’s important thatwe learn, early on in America the Anxious, that Whippman’s
interest in self-help and happiness came out of a lonely period in her life,
after relocating to the States from the UK with her family. By implicating
herself, Whippman avoids coming across as snide or dismissive of her subjects.

The reader first meets Whippman at the gynecologist’s. I wasn’t
sure what to make of that choice of opener. Would a man begin a critique of the
US economy with a trip to his urologist? My ambivalence, however, lasted only
until the second page: Her doctor’s mid-exam small talk involves praising a
self-help guide. “I’ve read that book too,” Whippman writes, “and am suddenly
overcome with crippling self-consciousness. I hope desperately that my gynecologist
is not currently reading the part about how in order to achieve true happiness,
it is advisable to give total mental focus to how everything around you
smells.” No, a man probably wouldn’t have written that. But readers are lucky
someone did.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a writer living in New York. Her book, The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.